NCAA president Mark Emmert had the opportunity to do something unprecedented on Monday morning. He could have made a statement about the importance of education, of keeping football that is played in a university setting in its proper perspective.

Indeed, he believes he did just that by taking unilateral action against the Penn State program with a collection of penalties that are among the most severe in the organization’s history.

In one sense, however, he is terribly wrong.

With the authority of the NCAA board of directors and the cooperation of the university, Emmert slammed Penn State with a $60 million fine that will fund programs against child sexual abuse, a four-year ban from postseason play, 14 years worth of vacated victories and—here’s the kicker—scholarship reductions for the next four years.

Quite clearly, the NCAA wants to make it difficult for Penn State to succeed on the football field in the immediate future. That’s fine. According to the Freeh Report, the actions of university and athletic department leaders in declining to report allegations of child sexual abuse against one-time assistant coach Jerry Sandusky were egregious enough to justify devastating punishment.

With the NCAA leadership feeling compelled to make a powerful statement against what occurred, however, and with Penn State agreeing to sign off on an unprecedented rush to conclusion that circumvented the traditional enforcement/infractions process, the debate regarding the NCAA’s jurisdiction was rendered moot.

The decision to include a scholarship reduction in the list of penalties, though, is a profound disappointment. Emmert had an opportunity to demand something of Penn State that would have set a precedent for future infractions cases, and he failed by wielding a weapon that is as archaic as a mace.

The NCAA’s penalties against the football program mandate that the Nittany Lions sign no more than 15 football players per year over the next four years and carry no more than 65 players on scholarship during that period. Given that the NCAA ordinarily allows FBS football teams to have 85 players, that could mean as many as 20 scholarships will be destroyed each year to get Penn State to 65.

Such punishments have become so much a part of the landscape in college sports they are defended by rote as necessary for the offending program to feel the pain of competing with a limited roster. Surprisingly, no one gives much thought to what is occurring when a scholarship is taken from an athletic program.

That’s a free education destroyed. It’s gone. It is, as Monty Python would say about a dead parrot, “no more.”

If a football player can’t get a free education at Penn State, he’ll get one elsewhere. Let’s say he’ll get it from Cincinnati. But the Bearcats don’t get an extra grant to take that inside linebacker who no longer can become a Nittany Lion. They still can only have 85 players. Eventually, this trickles all the way down until somebody—more to the point, 20 somebodies—who would have been on scholarship at the worst Division I program, let’s say Akron, finds he is out of luck.

The NCAA likes to promote its organization as one representing “400,000 student athletes, most of whom will go pro in something other than sports.” That’s the kid we’re talking about here. The NCAA is turning its back on 20 such young men each year for the next four.

The NCAA should not been in this business, and yet it imposes scholarship reductions not only in infractions cases but also in circumstances where specific sports programs fall short of Academic Progress Rate guidelines.

In taking this step against Penn State, which costs roughly $30,000 per year, the NCAA has destroyed $2.4 million worth of free education. At the very least, given its leverage in this case, the NCAA might have thought to order PSU to take the money it would have spent on football grants and fund 20 full scholarships annually for deserving non-athletes, something that might have served as a guide in future infractions penalties. Something that would have been more in keeping with the NCAA’s expressed mission as an educational entity, the mission that allows the organization to operate as a non-profit.

It is well past time for the NCAA to remove itself from the business of “scholarship reductions” when penalizing offending athletic programs and move toward the more pertinent concept of “roster management.” A free college education is a wonderful thing. Shouldn’t the NCAA understand this by now?